


you remind me of a firework, boy

by verity



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, Genderswap, as close to fluff as this author writes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-02
Updated: 2011-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-14 08:30:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joanna Watson has had a lot of girlfriends, and they've all had different soundtracks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you remind me of a firework, boy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roseyprosey](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=roseyprosey).



> written for roseyprosey for [holmestice and beta'd by the lovely Quinara.]()
> 
>  **caveat lector:** This fic came about because my bff said to me, "You know, John is _totally_ the kind of guy who listened to all his girlfriends' singer-songwriter mixtapes in college." And come on, Joanna Watson, famous ladykiller, who doesn't want that? In writing this, I depicted a world (and army) that are a lot more queer-friendly (if still heteronormative in a lot of ways) than they have been historically; it's a known oversight on my part.

Joanna Watson is the type of girlfriend who learns to have an opinion about whether Amy Ray or Emily Saliers is the best vocalist, even though she prefers U2. She can open a stubborn jar of olives as easily as she can flip an omelet. She wore a tux at her sisters' wedding, but only because the rest of the bridal party decided to make a statement.

Sherlock Holmes wears her hair in a long braid and never bothers with makeup. She is ineffectual at the most basic household tasks but can synthesize highly exotic poisons within minutes from the contents of the spice cupboard (which doesn't necessarily contain spices). She steals D.I. Lestrade's Misfits poster and hangs it on her wall, even though she claims not to listen to music composed after 1940.

Lestrade looks at Joanna with misplaced sympathy every time he comes by the flat and Joanna doesn't know what kind of girlfriend Sherlock might be, not at all.

~

Once upon a time Joanna was an army doctor who got blown up, and then she was here in London, lost and adrift, and then she met Sherlock, and got blown up again. She sits by Sherlock's bed, waiting for her to wake up, and puts her hand over Sherlock's. Joanna tells herself it doesn't mean anything. Then, after a few minutes, she pulls back and folds her hands neatly over her lap, because she's not very good at lying, even to herself.

No point in dwelling on it, she thinks. Soon Moriarty will be just an unpleasant memory, Sherlock will be back to being her brilliant self, and the explosions will all be confined to the kitchen. Which is unfortunate, because Joanna really is quite good at making omelets.

"Stop talking about omelets," complains Sherlock, and Joanna realizes she's been babbling this whole time. God. But she'll worry about that later, because now, there's Sherlock and her bright blue eyes and-

"Hey," Joanna replies, smiling tightly. She's probably already given herself away in ten, fifteen minuscule but screamingly obvious ways by now, and she can't identify the twisting feeling in her gut.

But all Sherlock says is, "I could do with a cup of tea and some more morphine," and it's easier for Joanna to object with giddy, ridiculous disbelief than to interrogate whatever it is that's taken root inside her.

~

The explosion at the pool broke one of Sherlock's ankles, cracked three ribs, and sprained two of the fingers of her left hand, in addition to giving her a serious concussion. Joanna, with her broken arm, feels that she got off lightly. Of course, it's both her dominant arm and the one without a bad shoulder attached, so simple tasks like getting dressed and making tea can only be accomplished at a glacial speed.

She's fumbling with the kettle the morning after they return to the flat when she sees Sherlock stirring in her perch on the sofa. Sherlock's violin is on the coffee table beside to her, lying pristine in its open case. Sherlock reaches out with one hand to touch its smooth surface.

Later, after breakfast and lunch and the unpleasant discovery of last week's kidney in the crisper, Joanna asks, "When did you take up violin?"

Sherlock, who's gotten up from the sofa and returned to sullenly flop back onto it at least eight times since this morning, is reclining on the sofa once more. She closes her eyes and pretends to be asleep. It's not very convincing, but Joanna doesn't press her.

She doesn't even ask if Molly's expecting them to return the kidney.

~

Things at 221B have changed slightly, subtly since the two of them returned from the hospital. Joanna gets as restless as Sherlock can when they're not on a case; she finds herself lying sleepless at night while Sherlock plays through Paganini's _Caprices_ a floor below her. She thinks about calling Sarah sometimes, but instead she reaches for the box under her bed and goes through the letters Laura wrote her the first year she was deployed, the mixtapes Katie and Susan and Lizzy made her in college, the photos she took of all of them, faces bright and eager still when she opens the album.

Joanna still likes U2 and she's never gotten into Ani DiFranco, that was more Harry's thing. She's not a big fan of Paganini either. But when Sherlock plays her violin downstairs, Joanna locks the door, lies down on her neatly made bed, and slips her hand beneath the smooth elastic waistband of her panties. She closes her eyes and pretends that Sherlock is making this transient music just for her, pretends that Sherlock knows why she comes up to her room every night, pretends that Sherlock _knows_ and plays on and sometimes Joanna wonders, slick fingers resting on her thigh as she catches her breath afterward, if she really is just pretending.

~

Joanna crouches over the body outside the warehouse and studies the man. He's a dock worker by the name of Rupert Harrison, and they've been on his trail for the last thirty-four hours. "Dead less than ten minutes," she tells Sherlock. "His throat's slit, but—" Sherlock is already off, coat fluttering behind her, even though they've arrived well ahead of Scotland Yard and hasn't Sherlock learned that going in without backup is stupid? Joanna swears under breath, pats at her hip for the comforting bulk of her gun, and follows her friend inside.

Something she always thinks about, after, is how action sequences always have a score in movies. In the warehouse, there's just the scuffle of footsteps, and the ring of shots - Harrison's former partner shooting at Sherlock, Joanna shooting at him. She hits Smith in the knee with her second shot, and he drops his gun. The other knee, and he falls.

It takes her a few awful moments to find Sherlock, who's leaning against a tall packing crate, right hand wrapped around her left bicep. "Let me look," Joanna says, instead of kissing her, and Sherlock loosens her fingers. The bullet grazed her - not deeply, but it looks painful. "Handkerchief?"

"Left pocket in my jacket," Sherlock tells her, pursing her lips in annoyance, though it's hardly the first time Joanna's had to appropriate one to dress a wound. Joanna tries to ignore the warmth of Sherlock's breast against the back of her hand as she fumbles for the linen square.

As swiftly and impersonally as she can, she bandages Sherlock's arm. "There. That should hold until the Yard gets here."

Joanna lets her fingers linger on Sherlock's arm for a few unnecessary moments.

~

It's been a slow week for cases, but thankfully Sherlock's diverted by an experiment she's conducting with paramacetol and bits of plastic from soda bottles and milk jugs. "I have to see which polymorphs synthesize in each sample," she explains, enraptured. There are shaggy crystalline clumps floating around beakers stashed all over the flat which vaguely resemble nascent rock candy.

"I see," says Joanna as she shifts some of them around to make room for important things like the post and the bottle of Strongbow she intends to enjoy during the Man U game. "Fate of the world, hmm?"

"It has great promise for the future of the pharmaceutical industry," Sherlock concedes. Then she goes back to heating terrifying things on the stove and pretending the flat has a fume hood.

Later that night Joanna searches for "Sherlock Holmes" on Google Scholar. The results are enlightening, but not surprising.

~

 

Joanna remembers what it's like to have a crush, that eager knot in her chest every time a certain girl tousled her hair, looked Joanna's way, or said something just so. It's not quite like this, with Sherlock. Sherlock is striking, yes, if indifferent about her looks unless it suits her purposes. It's not as if she doesn't notice Joanna - for all that she's forever the one dragging Joanna out of the flat, she's also always the one following Joanna back into it. And almost everything Sherlock says is brilliant or offensive or ridiculous or some mixture of all three. The thing that makes a crush so powerful, of course, is the distance between her and the idealized object of her affection, and there's none of that distance between Joanna and Sherlock.

Well, almost none.

~

"What did you want to be when you grew up? When you were a kid?" Joanna asks her friend. They're watching _Merlin_ , because Joanna knows Sherlock likes telling her how tedious, anachronistic, and logically inconsistent the entire plot is.

"A concert violinist, of course," Sherlock answers. She's lying down on the sofa, her head in Joanna's lap.

"Why aren't you?" Joanna's genuinely curious.

Sherlock close her eyes and exhales slowly. "It doesn't matter."

"I wanted to be a doctor." On screen, Merlin and Arthur are making eyes at each other. "My mum asked me if I wanted to be a nurse, like her, but I didn't."

"You wanted to be a soldier, too. You played soldiers with your cousins until you got old enough that they started telling you that you couldn't play with them because you were a girl," Sherlock murmurs.

"True," she admits. It hurt once, but then she grew up to be Joanna, who no longer ached for her mother to call her Jo and could save the world one person at a time all by herself. "Did you have cousins like that, too?"

"No cousins. Just Mycroft."

Hesitantly, Joanna moves the arm that's been draped across the back of the couch and threads her fingers through Sherlock's hair, out of its tight braid for once. Released from confinement, it's thick and wavy, long enough to hit the small of Sherlock's back. Sherlock turns on her side, toward the TV, and Joanna teases the tangles from Sherlock's hair, pulls it away from her slender neck. "You wanted to be the best, and you weren't," she says.

"'No feeling,'" Sherlock sounds like she's quoting someone. "'Extraordinary technical competence, but no feeling.'"

Joanna frowns. "Whoever said that has never heard you play."

"I didn't play like that for them."

~

Sherlock has worked her way through the Paganini and has started on something new that Joanna doesn't recognize. Joanna towels her hair dry, and slips on a t-shirt and pajama pants. She pads downstairs in bare feet, moves down the hall and turns right into the living room.

From the threshold, she can see Sherlock standing by the window. She's still in her suit and her hair is up, braided and curled in on itself into a neat bun on the back of her head.

Joanna Watson is the type of girlfriend who learns to have an opinion about Paganini and Bach, even though she prefers U2. She can perform field surgery as easily as she can shoot a man through a window from another building. She lets Angela put a candle on their table whenever they eat at her restaurant, even though she keeps telling everyone they're not actually dating.

She thinks, now, as she crosses the room, that Sherlock never really says anything about that, one way or the other.

Sherlock's playing stops when Joanna begins gently to tugs the pins from her hair. Joanna gathers them into a little pile and sits them on the table they use as a desk. Then she unweaves Sherlock's long braid, loosening it with her fingers, until Sherlock's hair fans, dark and softly curling, across her back.

Pulling Sherlock's hair to one side, Joanna kisses the long column of her throat exposed by the unfastened collar of her shirt. Sherlock inhales sharply, and murmurs, "Joanna…"

"Were you afraid?" she asks, kindly. "Sherlock. You only had to say the word, and I—"

Sherlock turns then, and kisses her, not at all kindly. Sherlock's much taller, and Joanna has rise up on the tips of her toes at first before Sherlock pulls her close. She places her palms flat against Sherlock's chest, feels as much as she hears her sigh. Joanna caresses Sherlock's left breast, this time not quite so impersonally, and Sherlock moans softly into her mouth.

Sherlock Holmes wears her hair in a long braid that she'll let Joanna brush out some nights. She is adept at almost setting the house afire but never forgets a linen square for her pocket. She watches dubious TV with Joanna even though she claims that no modern show will ever eclipse the glory of the Fourth Doctor.

"Come on," says Joanna. "It's late. Let's go to bed."

And they do.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Op. 13 Sonata in A Minor, 'Cantatio Ioannae'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/378265) by [nox_candida](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nox_candida/pseuds/nox_candida)




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